White GL People, Stop Appropriating Our Heroes And Sheroes

“We’re the white Rosa Parks. We’re not getting off the bus.”   Christel Conklin

No Christel Conklin, neither you or your partner are Rosa Parks.  You and your partner Aimee Whitchurch were not riding on a segregated Montgomery, AL bus on December 1, 1955.

You had someone paint a threatening anti-gay slogan on the garage door to your shared condo and leave a hangman's noose on your Parker,.CO doorstep in October 2011.  

One of the things that pisses off African-Americans inside and outside the rainbow community is when white GL people appropriate our history , our heroes and sheroes, use them in out of context situations or claim 'they are them'.

Are you or Aimee members of the NAACP or advisors to an NAACP youth group like Rosa Parks was?   Did either of you go to jail for standing up for the human rights principles you believed in?  

Have people in Parker,CO and beyond started protesting against the injustice aimed at LGBT people as a result of the anti-gay slogan being painted on your condo's garage door by initiating a year long economic boycott?  

Has that economic boycott in Parker brought to America's attention the leadership abilities of an eloquent young justice minded minister?   

Do either of you hold the Congressional Medal of Honor? Are you ladies honorary members of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc?

If the answer is no Christel to those questions I posed, then you can't proclaim that you and Aimee are 'the white Rosa Parks'. I'm African-American, trans, a historian and an activist and I know better than to claim I am Rosa Parks because I'm not.'the mother of the civil rights movement'.

You are a white 21st century lesbian couple who was subjected to a hate crime.  What was done to you and your partner was foul, I'm angry about it and I hope the waste of DNA who committed the crime is swiftly caught and punished for it.

Had you stuck with telling your compelling story you would have been more powerfully effective in getting the message across that lesbiphobia and anti-gay bigotry is wrong and that GLBT rights are a human rights issue.

But the second you opened your mouth and made the problematic declaration that you and your partner were the 'white Rosa Parks' it derailed your narrative.

White GL people claim to respect the African-American Civil Rights Movement and its accomplishments, but not only continue to fail to learn the lessons from it, but continue to clumsily appropriate our movement heroes and sheroes and insert them in non-analogous situations.

And it pisses us off when you do so.  . 

It also points out the importance of the just concluded LGBT History Month in which we must do a better job of getting to know our LGBT heroes and sheroes and passing that information down to our younglings.

While Black history is American history we can all be proud of and has lessons we can glean from it, at the same time there's a fine line between talking about my African descended heroes and sheroes and appropriating them.  


TransGriot Note: Seems like I wasn't the only person in the Afrosphere this problematic  'we're the white Rosa Parks' declaration in this interview bothered.